I really liked the part of chapter 6 that talked about group work. The descriptions of the types of students that you find working in groups. Gallagher talks about how group projects will sometimes encourage some students to "hitchhike" and not provide any input to group discussion. I encountered this in my practicum lesson that I did on Tuesday. For the most part I think that the students were engaged in the discussion of William Blake that I wanted them to engage in. I saw some students discussing spring break while others were simply sitting on the sidelines. My inexperience led me to wonder about the correction of this behavior but it definitely gave me something to think about.
I was so glad that chapter 6 covered this aspect of teaching because I plan on doing a lot of group work and want to do it affectively. Gallagher provides some great ideas for organizational structure. I think that it is important to give each group member a job to do, especially after I witnessed the reality of student participation first hand. So I guess the question for those who wish to respond is, "how are you going to ensure that your students are contributing group members?".
5 comments:
I also thought that the section on hitchhiking was very important. Grouping students is very difficult because you never know exactly who is going to do what and how well. It is important to recognize that students (no matter what) will try to hitchhike through any project. We, as college students, still do it today! Keeping a close eye on ways to eliminate hitchhiking altogether is difficult, but it must be done.
I think the only way to ensure that students do there part of the work is to have them grade eachother on participation. Unfortunately this can lead to problems with who likes who and who has an axe to grind. We just have to stay alert, like Stacy said, and hope for the best while doing our best to stop it from happening.
This is one question that I haven't yet discovered an answer to. We are constantly taught that group work is essential to the non-lecture atmosphere of teaching that we want to establish. However, even as an A student, I often used group discussion time as a chance to talk about anything but what I was supposed to be. And I've watched that some in my practicum. I don't know how to do it right....I have no answers.
Random Accountability. That's th answer. What if you had everyone responsible for recording their activities. Then, randomly, you could collect and score them. If they don't know when you're going to grade/pick-up, their more likely to do the work.
My wife uses this technique for homework assigments for her college level kids. If it works here, it'll work there. If not, experiment....
This is a good question. I think the type of activity it is also depends on how the teacher should supervise it. If it is some kind of research project or big assignment I think it would be important to create different jobs for each student in that group to be responsible for. I also think that contract grading could help to. If you sat down with each student in the group and layed out what grade do you want to go for? And then give them the guidelines. I think effective group work takes time to figure out. So experimenting I think would have to be the way to go.
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